For talk-to-text, Dragon is the way to go

Sunday

Jan 13, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Bob and Joy Schwabach ON COMPUTERS

People love to talk. Just look at all the TV shows that are about nothing else. But here in the computer world, we want to see that talk printed on the screen and the page. So, every time we mention a program for converting talk to text, we get a lot of reader response: Is it any good, they ask? Does it really work? People have a lot to say.

It’s like this: There are two or three programs that can listen to the words coming out of your mouth and show them on the screen, more or less.

Windows and Macintosh computers come with speech recognition programs built in; you talk, they listen. (These dictation programs are not to be confused with “Siri” or “Android S-Voice,” used for Web searches.) In our tests, the dictation programs were junk. When Joy said something about reviewing Bob’s dinner, the Macintosh program wrote “Reviewing Butthead for dinner.” (Were they trying to tell us something?) Windows was just as bad.

The one you see advertised regularly on TV and in print is Dragon Naturally Speaking 12, referred to henceforth simply as Dragon. Besides dictation, Dragon can be used to control your computer. (Dragon, by the way, is the program behind Siri for iPhones and Dragon Go for Android phones.)

What they call the “home” version of Dragon 12 is available for $100 from the maker’s website, nuance.com. The “premium” version is $200. What’s the difference? The premium version lets you make up your own commands instead of memorizing theirs. For example: “Send this brilliant note to Bob and Joy.” It also lets you use a wireless headset — great for pacing around the room. Both versions are available for around half price at discounters like Amazon or Tiger Direct. This is a lot cheaper than the first time we looked at Dragon several years ago; back then price was more than $400.

As in the past, there’s an initial learning period with Dragon, in which you get to know the program and it gets to know you. This takes a few hours. If you have a heavy accent it takes longer.

Dragon gets it right 99 percent of the time. You might think, “Well then, no problem.” But in fact, that is the problem: There are mistakes on every page. In practice it means you should edit everything before printing or sending, or you can easily look like an idiot. When Joy said, “I have to remember,” it changed that to “After member.” “Love you too” came out “Love you to.”

The use of verbal commands is handy: You can post to Facebook just by saying “Post to Facebook.” The same goes for Twitter. This works in Internet Explorer or Firefox. In Google Chrome, “Post to Facebook” sent our post to Twitter and “Go to Gmail” started up Microsoft Outlook. They’re working on that.

There’s a free version of Dragon, called Dragon Dictation, which is for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch or Android. This just turns your voice recording into text on the phone screen. The result cannot be edited by voice command, but you can email it or post it to Facebook or Twitter.

We often use Pocket to save articles we want to read later. Pocket software is free for Windows, and now there’s a Mac version.

This program used to be called Read It Later, which we think was a better name. You can capture whatever you want to see or read, even if it extends beyond what is visible on the screen. So, Pocket captures the whole article, which can be many pages long.

You can get the latest version at GetPocket.com. Pocket automatically adds itself to the bookmarks bar in your browser. When you click it, whatever you’re looking at it is saved for later. Click Pocket again and click “View list” to find it again. Be quick, because it’s only there for a couple of seconds.

Joy’s sister considered buying a new Mac just because she lost all her photos on the old one. Disk Drill Pro from CleverFiles.com is an $89 program for recovering stuff.

There’s no guarantee that you’ll get everything back, but it improves your odds. We deleted a document and then emptied the trash and Disk Drill still found the file, plus everything else we’d deleted over the past several months.

The free version of Disk Drill only finds lost files; it doesn’t recover them. A preview mode in the free version, however, lets you see the file you lost. That way you know if it’s worth paying for the program and doing the full recovery.

Moo.com offers business cards, and some are free. We got a card one-half the width of a normal card from an artist who restores books. It’s called a mini-card and it had her photo and info on the front and another photo covering the back. Looked nice.

ISpot.TV has more than 15,000 commercials you can watch till you drop. You don’t have to buy anything.

ThisLife.com offers free photo storage for 1,000 photos or 100 gigabytes of files for $3 a month. It can import photos from any other site or folder, and use keyword searches to find particular shots — if you have previously labeled those shots with an identifying word (It’s not magic, you know).

If you make YouTube videos, podcasts or radio or TV programs, you’ve probably looked for music to go with the action. We ran into this problem when we did a podcast on BlogTalkRadio a couple of years ago. It’s illegal to use copyrighted music without paying for it.

The best site we’ve seen recently for buying music is the new Stereobot.com. For corporate meetings, presentations and strictly internal business use, the price is $30 a year for all the music you want, though a few special selections are off-limits except to premium subscribers. It’s $50 for YouTube or Internet use, and $75 a year for use in a theater production. The guy who founded Stereobot also founded SoundSnap, which has 700,000 customers, including Disney, the BBC, Pixar and Zynga.

Another source for background music is SoundTracker.com. With its 99 cent iPhone app, you get five royalty-free music selections, and you can buy more, three for 99 cents or six for $2.